Global telephone services today are provided through a Public Switched Telephone Network (hereafter, PSTN). As viewed presently, the PSTN is the aggregate of all lines and equipment serving to connect users of telephones (land-based, radio and other), but excludes private networks formed from leased telephone lines and public data networks like the Internet and/or World Wide Web (hereafter also referred to as the Web).
Certain services available to customers and other users of the PSTN--e.g. call waiting, call forwarding, call blocking, etc.--are generally in either an enabled or disabled state while individual subscriber telephones are idle (on hook), and may be set to the reverse state by the user as part of the call dialing (or tone keying) process. For instance, call waiting can be set from enabled to disabled by entry of "*70" as a prefix to a called area code and telephone number. The entry may be performed either by telephone users or private equipment intermediate telephone company lines and telephone users (e.g. a PBX or a computer and modem interfacing to a telephone company line).
Procedures allowed by telephone companies for such controlling actions (by or in behalf of their customers) tend to unduly restrict times at which these actions can be performed (usually to the time of call-out dialing/tone keying), as well as to unduly limit the types of functions that can be controlled. For example, a telephone user having a centralized voice mail service might want to have specific messages replayed out of sequence; e.g. only the 7th and 8th messages in a series of say 10 recorded messages. However, it might be unfeasible for telephone companies to offer such facilities where operator intervention is unavailable or too costly, since the function might require so many actions by customers as to make that type of service unwieldy or impractical.
Furthermore, in respect to some services the user might have need to be able to disable them automatically for long periods of time (hours or days), rather than for single calls, or even to be able to disable them while a call connection is active. Such activities are generally unfeasible or impractical for use in today's PSTN infrastructure.
The present invention seeks to overcome limitations of today's PSTN infrastructure, and provide a cost-effective and simple system and method for enabling the PSTN to allow its customers and their agents (authorized users) to control (add, alter and remove) a wide variety of services at any time (before calls, during call dial-out, and while call connections are active). It also seeks to allow the PSTN to permit its customers and their agents to place highly sophisticated restrictions on their controlling actions (e.g. to be able to specify disablement of a given service for a precise number of minutes, hours or days, etc.).